We have two guests with us tonight to discuss the play both as production or performance and as text; the deed and the word. As Harold Goddard said, “Drama is a portrayal of human passions eventuating in acts. Poetry is a picture of life in its essence.” Shakespeare toils to mend the two.

In Act One, “The Play’s the Thing,” we’re joined by the director of the IU Theater Production of Romeo & Juliet, Nancy Lipschultz to talk about producing the play for the stage.

In Act Two, “The Prick of Noon,” we’re joined by Ellen MacKay, a scholar of early modern English drama and public culture whose approach to the Shakespearean stage is “driven by the epistemological problems that the theatre poses to a culture eager to draw a clear line between artifice and authenticity.” We discuss Shakespeare’s treatment of time.

We don’t need to withhold any plot points tonight as our subject is a play that was written sometime near the end of the 17th century and like all of Shakespeare’s plays is based on a prior text or two. It’s an ancient plot, warring tribes, political enmity in city-states, and even star-crossed lovers: all nothing new. We can even find Dante referencing historical Montagues and Capulets as feuding political parties in the Purgatory of his Divine Comedy.

And so you know, Romeo and Juliet are always dead before we even begin. It is the outcome that begs a reason why and the play begins with the Prologue giving up our ghosts.

The last few years in particular have seen a re-popularization of slave narratives: from Tarantino’s fictional Django Unchained to the award-winning 12 Years a Slave. But why did ex-slaves argue for their humanity through narratives rife with depictions of life in a brutal system which treated them as beasts? What were the stakes and aims for ex-slaves narrating their fight from savage beast to man? And what can we learn from them now?

Guests

Maisha Wester, an Associate Professor in Indiana University’s Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, and author of African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places.

Stephanie Li, the Susan D. Gubar Chair in Literature and professor in the Department of English, and author of Something Akin to Freedom: The Choice of Bondage in Narratives by African American Women, and most recently of Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama.

Tonight’s show, Shadows are Black: Slavery’s Long Setting, features a discussion on the text and context of Herman Melville’s 1855 novella “Benito Cereno.” “Benito Cereno” is clearly about slavery; but it also seems a deep meditation on the limits of the mind; on the ignorance of other ways to be minded; on the commonality of humanness (for “good” or “bad”). It is about America, it is about Spain, it is about Africa, and it is about cultural blindness and interpretive misconstrual. The stage setting is borrowed from Spain, the actors are nearly all African, and the play we’re watching turns out to be “The Ignorant American,” and the director is Babo.

Guests

Maisha Wester, an Associate Professor in Indiana University’s Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, and author of African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places.

Christopher Freeburg, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, and author of Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth Century America.

In Part One, we’re joined by Majed Akhter, an Assistant Professor of Geography at Indiana University Bloomington whose current research examines how state power shapes, and is in turn shaped by, mobile objects such as drones and rivers. His writing focuses especially on Pakistan and the United States.

And in Part Two we’ll joined by Stephen John and Greta Wohlrabe to discuss a new play being produced by The Cardinal Stage Company called “Grounded” by George Brant about a female Air Force fighter pilot “grounded” by pregnancy who becomes a drone pilot operating out of a trailer in the Nevada desert. John is the play’s director and Wohlrabe its star.

Morse Peckham had this to say about state violence and terrorism back in 1987 (“Literature and the State”).

It cannot be that the state objects to terrorism because its citizens are being killed. In this country the citizens kill each other by murder and automobiles, fifty percent of the latter by drunken driving, and the state remains on the whole quite unruffled, except when some group of citizens forming itself as an organ of the state manipulates the state to take some action….No, the state objects to terrorism for quite different reasons. A state maintains its legitimacy by maintaining a monopoly on the use of violence for politics and governance. Terrorism is a challenge to the state’s monopoly on violence for such purposes….The trouble with violence is that if it is used in its ultimate forms there is no further recourse. So we may understand civilization as the strategy by which control and position are maintained without resorting to violence. Legal texts are of the first importance, of course, in circumventing the use of violence as well as justifying violence.

Host Doug Storm is joined by two local solar energy activists and a climate scientists to discuss the state of renewable energy policy in Indiana. Last week Republican State Representative for District 65, Eric Allen Koch, filed a bill (HB1320) with the General Assembly that would change the relationship between our area’s electric utility company, Duke Energy, and its solar customers who participate in the popular net metering program. We’ll do our best here tonight to describe the consequences of that bill should it find its way to becoming law.

Solar energy is a major form of renewable energy used to produce electricity. It poses a major alternative to coal, Indiana’s traditional source of energy. Residential energy use totals over $3.2 billion in Indiana, making residential solar a very real threat to the coal economy.

HB1320 seeks to eliminate the productive incentive of returning energy to the power grid from a home photovoltaic system.

Guests
Ben Brabson is a climate scientist at Indiana University and retired professor of physics, whose research focuses on extreme temperatures and their connection to soil moisture. The courses he teaches at Indiana University identify our sources of energy and the critical need to move away from climate damaging fossil fuel use.

Woodie Bessler is an electrical engineer and spokesperson for SIREN, the Southern Indiana Renewable Energy Network, a non-profit promoter of the adoption of solar energy. He speaks widely on solar energy issues. He and his household were the grand prize winners of SIREN’s 2010 Energy Showdown Going Solar programs. He currently serves on committees for GUEP (Georgetown University Energy Prize), about which we hope to get an update.

Arvind Gopu is an IT professional who does Going Solar presentations for SIREN and provides individual home site assessments.

Host Doug Storm is joined by Rasul Mowatt and Jacinda Townsend to discuss why Martin Luther King, Jr. has been remembered and elevated to represent the struggle toward civil rights as opposed to other civil rights leaders such as Malcolm X; and how creating a “great leader” to follow can undermine the support of community movements for social and economic justice.

Rasul Mowatt is an Associate Professor in Indiana University’s School of Public Health.

Jacinda Townsend is an Assistant Professor the English Department at Indiana University and author of the novel Saint Monkey.

Host Doug Storm is joined by David Delaney from the Indiana University Maurer School of Law and Steve Myers from the School of Informatics and Computing to talk about cybersecurity in the public and private sphere.

From the recent hack into Sony Industries ostensibly perpetrated by North Korea to oil pipeline sabotage in Turkey, both our physical places and our digital spaces are vulnerable to almost anyone or any “nation-state” with the right skill-set and knowledge. As guest Steve Myers said, uranium isn’t cheap, but people with computer knowledge are.

Tonight’s program is one half of a collaboration with WFHB’s Books Unbound centered around a memoir of a first-person eyewitness account written by Wang Xiuchu of the 1645 Massacre in Yangzhou, China, called, in English, An Account of Ten days at Yangzhou. This memoir will be featured this Saturday at 5 pm on Books Unbound. The Massacre at Yangzhou was translated by Lynn Struve, and the memoir is read by Eric Rensberger.

Tonight we hear from Lynn Struve about this memoir as well as the historical context in which it takes place. We’ll also get some idea about how to think about the events in the narrative. But this story has two voices. Wang Xiuchu lives the events–but he is one of the crowd, lucky (if he can be called lucky) to escape death. There is also the voice of Shi Kefa, who was the soldier statesmen responsible for defending Yangzhou at the time of the Massacre. Frank Buczolich reads a letter home from Shi Kefa, the man who has come to represent the epitome of patriotic Chinese resistance to modern nationalistic writers. But we should not be so sanguine about that particular interpretation of history. Wang Xiuchu, and Lynn Struve, help us with that.

Patsy Rahn, a local poet who works in the Education Department of the Indiana University Art Museum, introduces her interview with retired IU professor, Chinese scholar and translator, Lynn Struve for Interchange.

As I considered making a show to serve as a kind of year in review, I first thought to choose my favorite program from each month of the year, 12 shows, excerpt 3 minutes for flavor, a bit of commentary or set-up. Well, when I got to the month of May and saw three weeks of Raintree County–and remembered my interest and involvement with this book and the world of its author and his suicide at the peak of his worldly success–I made a new plan. My most important story of 2014, reading and thinking about Raintree County in the 100th anniversary of the author’s birth.

Raintree County was published in 1948, the same year as Indiana University professor Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and these two authors and these two books might actually illuminate each other.

Also, a quick note to let you know that the music you hear within these programs is from the soundtrack to the movie Raintree County, the 1957 film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Eva Marie Saint and Lee Marvin. Johnny Green was the composer.

Part I excerpts the May 6th episode Taking the Measure of Raintree County and my guests are Don Gray, emeritus professor of English literature at Indiana University; Eric Sandweiss, Carmony Chair in the Department of History at IU and Editor of the Indiana Magazine of History; and Cherry Williams, Curator of Manuscripts at The Lilly Library at Indiana University. Much of this episode focused on an exhibit of Lockridge Jr.’s personal papers, manuscripts, and family memorabilia showcased at the Lilly Library, in particular the one artifact that serves as the novel’s framing device, The Illustrated Historical Atlas of Henry County Indiana of 1875.

Part II excerpts the May 13th program which consisted of my interview with Ross Lockridge Jr.’s second son, Larry Lockridge, whose biography Shade of the Raintree was re-issued by Indiana University Press this year in a 20th anniversary edition.

Part III excerpts my interview with Ernest Lockridge, the oldest of son of the Ross Lockridge, Jr. and author of several novels, Prince Elmo’s Fire being the most successful, and a kind of photo expose/memoir called The Skeleton Key to the Suicide of My Father.

We’re joined by Scott Herring, author of The Hoarders, a cultural history of the recent DSM-5 diagnosis of Hoarding Disorder. We talk about famous pack rats such as the Collyer Brothers of Harlem, Andy Warhol, and Big Edie and Little Edie Beale from the documentary Grey Gardens. Herring argues that this new disease has a significant–and overlooked–cultural back story from the 1930s to the present.

Also discussed: Ralph and Terry Kovel, authors of a nationally syndicated collectibles column that began in 1955; and Sandra Felton, “The Organizer Lady” and founder of “Messies Anonymous.”

Scott Herring is an associate professor in the Department of English at Indiana University.